Bowness has become very, very quiet.
Today it has rained. It has rained rather a lot.
When this happens on Bank Holiday Monday, everybody gets up, eats breakfast and goes home to make their sandwiches and do their ironing ready for work tomorrow.
When it is sunny people stay for much longer. They spend their last precious holiday day ambling about, looking at the lake and breathing in the Lake District’s speciality air, which at this time of year is a heady mixture of farmyard dung sprayed over fields, and exhaust fumes from Bank Holiday traffic. They go to work in crumpled clothes on Tuesday, and eat a pie from Asda for their lunch, but they don’t mind, because they have had a day of freedom and stunning mountain glory to remember, and to treasure during the dark months of the winter.
Today there is no warm mellow sunshine to celebrate the last of the summer, and so everybody has become bored with Peter Rabbit, and buzzed off, except for a few determined enthusiasts who have booked in for a week, and who are wandering about looking damply disconsolate in anoraks.
We have not been terribly busy, but it is going to be all right. It is not midnight yet, and we have made enough money to pay for the mortgage and the new iPad and even to pay something off our overdraft, so things are going very nicely. The only small cloud on our domestic horizon, not counting the massive clouds covering the entire Lake District sky, is that my taxi has developed a squeaky fan belt and will now need to be hospitalised again tomorrow.
This does not really matter, because tomorrow everything of a holiday nature will be over, and Mark says that the problem is in a thing called a tensioner. He has looked at it all very throughfully and has decreed that it is not a serious enough squeak to mean that the car will break down before then.
This is a relief. It is embarrassing to have a squeaky car, and one grumpy customer was rude about it tonight and said that he was going to report me to VOSA.
I ignored him with the sort of lofty superciliousness that comes of not being able to think of anything sensible to say. In any case, he was only being rude because he was in the middle of having a row with his wife. Also he was very short, and from Preston, and uncomfortably aware that neither of those things were attractively seductive qualities in a gentleman.
VOSA don’t have anything to do with taxis anyway, even ones with squeaky fan belts, but I thought I would leave him to work that out for himself.
It is tiresome, though, because there are lots of other things we would rather be doing than fixing squeaky taxis. We have already been obliged to spend the whole of today, absolutely the whole thing, from morning until going-to-work time, in removing dust from Ibbetson Towers.
There was lots of it. I don’t suppose you can remember the last time I dusted, because I couldn’t. We emptied cupboards and scrubbed the bath. I washed the china and Mark polished the furniture with lovely silky beeswax polish. We lit the last orange-scented home made candle and by the time we had finished washing and scrubbing, everywhere was warm and glowing and loved again, which was much nicer than the grey-fluff-laden wasteland that it had been.
Cleaning things is such a tiresome way of spending a day, but having clean things is very comforting indeed. Especially it is happy to come home after driving drunk people about in a taxi, to a house which smells of polish and lavender and cinnamon and orange candle.
We have got that to look forward to, and it will be splendid. By the end of the night we are hoping to have earned enough cash to pay off all of our reckless debts. After that we will have a whole day tomorrow free of driving taxis, even if we have got to do some mending to one, and our house is shining-clean and friendly.
This bank holiday marks the beginning of the end of the summer.
There were brown fallen leaves in the road tonight.
